Healing Old Wounds – Vol. 461, August 2,  2018

Over the past few weeks, I have been on the road again. I was staying with an older friend who had some very serious health issues that spun out of control. Over the last few months, all his gains in health went down, as my friend was relying ever more on alcohol to self-medicate his very bad pain in his arthritic left hip. The last straw was finding him unresponsive one morning when I went to give him his morning medications, needing to call the ambulance to get him to the hospital. Things had been going downhill fast for the past couple of months, so it was time for me to go. It was just too much responsibility to take on should he have returned home. Actually, one of his friends had called me several times to tell me that – to leave for my own sake, for nothing was going to change. 

I decided to go to Vermont, a place that always had a calming effect on me with the large open land, beautiful mountains with the general peacefulness of the state. No billboards to ruin the picturesque views. Just a lovely place to do some healing after this terrible ordeal. I ended up staying with a very spiritual gentleman who was living off the land in the most basic of ways. I had signed on to camp in the woods, which isn’t something that I would normally do. However, it seemed like the right environment with the right person. He had a tent for me in the woods, up on a platform to keep me dry should it rain. Thankfully, it didn’t rain while I was there. More importantly, I had a chance to really think about the situations of the last year or so and all the loss that I had been through. As I assessed each of the losses, what I came to realize was that in each case, the person involved was in very deep pain. Some were in both physical and emotional pain, not knowing how to rid themselves of it. 

I thought about all the health issues that I had been through over the years. None of them were able to take my life away from me. Each of them had solutions, even though in some cases it took decades to figure out, but figure it out I did, never giving up on being able to return myself to great health once again. 

I realized that people are only going to do for themselves what they want to do. Actually, a few of my friends pointed that out to me, though, it was something I certainly knew intellectually, it was not something that was easy to deal with in each of these cases. 

But, there was one other situation that I knew needed some real healing, for it was time to do it. My older sister and my youngest sister were constantly telling me that my younger sister and I have so much in common, that it is a shame that I wouldn’t talk to her. No, I wouldn’t talk with her, because it seemed that over 80% of the time we got together, even when I and my then husband went to her home to help her then partner do work on it, she would find ways to say mean sarcastic things to me. She would put me at the butt of her sarcastic jokes, or be invasive as to what I was doing with my life. None of these attitudes were conducive to my wanting to be around her. So, for the most part, I stayed away, happier without the negative commentaries. She could talk about me behind my back all she wanted, and she did, as the stories got back to me from two of my other sisters. 

However, now it did seem that it was time to heal this wound. So, I left Vermont and drove to New Hampshire to her home. The cell phone didn’t work in the mountains, and I didn’t want to lose the directions on my cell phone either. So, I decided to just show up at her home and let her know the story of how I ended up there. All she could do was throw me out. I did know that she wanted to have a chance for us to heal our differences as well. It hurt her that I wouldn’t speak to her, so the last thing she was going to do was to throw me out, especially without a place to go, having had to leave the previous place I was at. My sister also knew from negative questioning my old roommate put on her Facebook page, that he was unhappy with my being there. We fought all the time with his not being willing to eat the food I made from scratch for him or the fact that he hadn’t bathed for weeks on end, fearful of not being able to get out of the tub. So, she knew that I needed to leave that unhealthy environment. 

Her husband was upset that I was there, as I hadn’t treated either one of them very well at the bedside of my dying mother back in September. Most of the issues that I had with my sister were from before her husband came into her life, so he hadn’t any understanding of the situation and it wasn’t something that I wanted to delve into with him. I just told him that I and my sister needed to have this time to do some healing work together. He didn’t have to like my being there, and I do believe over time he started to understand more of why I was there. 

The miracle of the week that I spent there, was that my sister and I didn’t have even one argument. Yes, there are certain things that we do not agree on, especially our past history, but that is okay. We can agree to disagree on our perspectives on that ancient history. And, though we spoke a little about the issues at hand, what I really wanted was to begin all over, because I am well aware of the fact that each of us will have our memories and that they won’t necessarily match. Though we did speak a bit of the past, I really didn’t want to dredge through all the crap. She asked me some pointed questions, I answered them and that was it. 

I would have to say though, that my sister has a great sense of humor, and the immediate healing was done with her hysterical comments of various things in the news or stories she shared about interactions she had with her friends or with our mother that were all very funny. 

Mainly being very interested in the politics of our day, my sister spent her time listening to talk shows she enjoys and interacting with people on Facebook and Quora. She helped to get me somewhat up to speed on the disgusting things that are going on in Washington, as I haven’t the stomach for it. And, we spent a lot of time playing Boggle and Banana Gram, a game I had never played before. She has always loved word games. Since she plays all the time, and has a much better vocabulary, especially of the unusual words one would play in such games, she creamed me. However, I never based my sense of self-esteem on playing games. I like the learning that is involved in learning the new words and seeing what I can do, even if it isn’t very much. This is an aspect of my personality that my younger sister always admired. I could play a game and didn’t need to win it. Plus it is fun to play these games. It is very well known that my spelling sucks, so we just laugh at my mistakes. 

I and my sister were able to clear the air, really clean, which is a great thing. She is much happier now with her husband who truly loves her in every way. He spoke easily about his feelings for her. And, I do believe this is the difference that made the difference. I just had to do it in my own time. 

It is important to take your time to heal when you are ready to, and not be forced into it. Because it is inevitable that there will be uncomfortable conversations that will need to be had. One needs to have the mental and emotional strength to handle it.

 The other thing that is most important, is to go into something like this with the right attitude. My attitude was that I was going to clear my past with my sister and create whatever new bonds we felt comfortable with going forward. There was zero allowance for anything else